Sharing my love of genealogy and my experience as a genealogist to inspire everyone to search out their family trees...the past, present, and future are all connected. Researching your family tree is like looking for a bunch of needles in a whole lot of haystacks, and then threading those needles together to tell your family's story. If you know where you come from you can know who you are and where you're going!

Friday, March 21, 2014

Call for help: Who was Thomas Thomas' parents?

Hello all - it's been awhile! Spring is finally here - the perfect time to start adding new leaves and branches to my tree again, I hope!

Since I began blogging about genealogy, I have connected with so many cousins near and far, old and young - many times I've been able to help them with a genealogy question or problem they've been having, but more often than not they have been invaluable in helping me break through my own brick walls and add to my branches. So I thought as a service to my genealogy clients, I'd offer them the opportunity to post their own genealogy problems, questions, or brick walls to my blog - you never know who's out there reading; you never know who's out there researching those same questions...or who is out there with the answers!

So today we have a question from K. about his great-great-grandfather, Thomas Thomas. According to K, Thomas Thomas is listed in the 1880 Census in Ellsworth, Kansas, where it says he was born in Pennsylvania and was married to Louisa A. According to his family's oral tradition, the couple lived previously in Lebanon, Ohio, where K's great grandmother, Rebecca Jane Thomas, was born. From there, the family moved to Ottawa (LaSalle), Illinois, where Rebecca married Loren(zo) Dow Pratt in 1866 - he was just home from the Civil War.

Soon after Rebecca and Lorenzo's marriage they moved to Marion, Kansas, and Thomas Thomas, her father, moved his family to Ellsworth, Kansas. In the 1880 census, Thomas is listed as a policeman, "which is interesting," K writes, "since Ellsworth was one of the wildest of the end of the trail cowtowns." Sounds exciting, right? Bet there are some good stories there! In addition to Rebecca Jane, Thomas and Louisa had a son, Joseph C., also of Marion, Kansas, and a daughter, Maria, who accompanied Louisa to Marion for the birth of Thomas V. Pratt (Rebecca's son and Thomas' grandson) in 1875.

So, to bring us back to the beginning, K wants to knock through his brick wall and answer the question: Who was Thomas Thomas' parents?

We have a lot of good info here - we have specific towns and locations, we have a few years, and we have a couple of siblings and in-laws, all of whom might have descendants out there researching these same questions or who already have the answers! So if anybody is reading this and just got that excited feeling of, "Oh my gosh - this is MY family, too!" whether or not you have the actually answer K is looking for (sometimes two people working together to search for the same answer is better than one), you can leave me a message in my comments and I will be happy to put you in contact with K and y'all can enjoy the fun of connecting with cousins!